The Paris Wife

When I read a book I enjoy, it’s hard for me to put it down. Chalk it up to streaks of obsessive-compulsiveness… but I tend to read and read until it’s done. Reading this way makes me feel as though I’m there, in the book, part of the experience. But, it also makes me read fast, and in the end I think I may have missed details one absorbs only by reading slowly and savoring the story.

And so it goes with The Paris Wife, the story of Hadley Hemingway, the first wife of Ernest. I started the book yesterday and have less than 100 pages to go. I’m right at the point where the marriage is about to break up. I’ve put the book down so that I can force myself to not rush to the end. I usually tend to rush through the end of a book just wanting to finish it—and when I do I always feel as though I’ve just crash-landed into a wall. I’m already sad knowing what the end will be, and wishing it wouldn’t happen this way.

Author Paula McLain tells the story of Hadley and Ernest through Hadley’s voice. It’s the story of their lives as a young couple with little or no money living in a decrepit apartment above a dance hall in Paris while Ernest labors to write and gain acceptance in a literary community that fuels the fires of would be artists and writers. This ex-patriot community includes, among other, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Ezra Pound. Stein had a strong influence in Hemingway’s writing, as he would visit her often and they would talk about his work. She read and critiqued his writing and her influence contributed to Hemingway’s directness and parsity with words. Gertrude Stein even becomes the godmother to Hadley’s and Ernest’s son, Bumbey.

Living in Paris during the 1920s has a romantic feeling about it—it was the time between the end of World War I, and the crash of 1929. Having experienced the War, it was a time when people wanted to feel alive, and eating, drinking, and dancing were high on the list of living. So was going away for a season, and the Hemingway’s would enjoy Schruns, Austria at the Christmas holidays for skiing and stay on until early Spring before returning to Paris. The Summer seasons were punctuated with trips to Pamplona, Spain where Ernest conducted his research on bullfighting. The five years of living as ex-pats in Paris were punctuated with a 5 month stint in Toronto, where Hadley gave birth to Bumbey, and several 10-day ocean crossing voyages Ernest took back and forth to meet with his publishers. It seems all so quaint to read about a 10 day sea crossing when now we travel and change continents within a matter of hours.

The book is a historical novel, a work of fiction based on the lives of Ernest and Hadley Hemingway. But it also gives a glimpse of reality of 1920s Paris and its literary community, as author McLain developed the story based on the thousands of pages of letters exchanged between Hadley and Ernest. What makes this a historical novel is that the dialogue was invented, and so we can only imagine what really was said between this husband and wife and their circle of friends.

I’m now going to force myself to tend to several mundane chores before I allow myself to return to reading the last 100 pages—slowly, so as not to miss any details before it all ends.